The U.S. economy is going through a transformation that is
fundamentally altering the situation of American working people. It is
removing the majority of workers from relatively secure job structures
and thrusting them into a semi-casualized labor market. It is destroying
the existing bases of power for both union and non-union workers.

Such changes have occurred before. The transformation of the
industrial economy in the early decades of the twentieth century
virtually destroyed the craft unionism that had been the principal basis
of the American labor movement. The Great Depression gave the coup de
grace to a form of labor organization that had long been dying. But the
obvious obsolescence of craft unionism also created the basis for a new
labor movement, based on industrial unionism.

Today, the industrial unionism that originated nearly half a
century ago appears practically as obsolete as craft unionism did in
1932. Working people will have to transform the labor movement, and
create new kinds of labor organizations, if they are to meet their needs
in the new world economy. While the social and political dimensions of
this process will be crucial, I will focus here on the economic aspects.

The triumph of industrial unionism in the late 1930s and 1940s was
made possible by specific developments in American capitalism.
Industrial specialization concentrated large numbers of workers from
particular industries around large industrial cities--auto workers in
Detroit, St. Louis, and Cleveland; rubber workers in Akron; steel
workers in Pittsburgh and Chicago. A few large national companies
dominated most major industries. Techniques of mass production and
"scientific management" had made company production systems
highly integrated, so that striking a key department could stop an
entire factory, and closing a few key plants could cripple a giant
company. Mechanized production meant heavy, long-term capital investment
of a kind which made plants difficult to move. It was this set of
economic and productive characteristics which made possible the sit-down
strikes, backed by mass picketing by tens of thousands of workers, which
forced steel, auto, rubber, and other corporations to recognize the CIO.

In the decades which followed initial recognition of industrial
unions, most employers came to accept them as a bearable and in some
ways advantageous phenomenon. With heavy, long-term investment in
highly integrated, highly mechanized factories, employers could better
afford increases in wages than they could disruptions of production. By
creating a channel for grievances, unions helped maintain a high-morale
labor force; by enforcing no-strike clauses in contracts, they served to
discipline the workforce and prevent wildcat work stoppages. Stable
unions which gave workers a stake in the existing system served as a
bulwark against potential radicalism. Union political power was strong
enough to make an all-out attempt at union-busting exceedingly costly.
finally, the continuing growth of the American economy during the era of
industrial unionism, based largely on the expansion of military spending
and of U.S. international ascendancy, made rising wages and benefits
compatible with rising profits for American corporations. American
business felt little need to terminate its marriage with the labor
movement, even though it was based on necessity and convenience, not
love.

During the three decades that followed the Second World War, a
series of economic changes gradually undermined the power bases of
industrial unionism. National highways and diesel trucks eroded
industrial specialization, so that basic industries became gradually
less concentrated. Combined with suburbanization, this reduced the
dense urban working-class environments that had supported union
organization; it also undermined the tie between workplaces and ethnic
neighborhoods and other communities. White flight to the suburbs,
together with black migration from declining southern agriculture to the
central cities, and then renewed immigration from Europe, Asia, and
Latin America, intensified the division of the working class along
racial and ethnic lines. Automation and other technological changes
destroyed many of the older union traditions, for example among printers
and construction workers. The massive increase in clerical, sales,
service, and toerh nonindustrial labor, the great majority of which
remained non-union, made unionized workers a steadily shrinking
proportion of the total labor force. Labor traditions were not
successfully transmitted to a new labor force that was increasingly
female, non-white, young, and nonindustrial. In the nearly half centry
since the rise of the CIO, the labor movement has probably made less
adaptation to a changing society than has any other major American
institution.

Meanwhile, American capitalism has been going through a
reorganization perhpas as great as that which led to the demise of craft
unionism early in the twentieth centiuury. This reorganization has many
features, almost all of which directly undermine the bases of industrial
union power.

Internationalization of the economy. The companies which were
forced to recognize the CIO were national companies, funcitoning in a
national economy. Despite the benefits they gained from American world
hegemony, they remained so at least through the 1950s. In the 1960s and
1970s, however, they became increasingly international, not only in
their marketing but in their production and their capital operations.
By the end of the 1970s, at least a third of all profits of the 100
largest U.S. multinational producers and banks came from overseas.
About 70 percent of manufacturing income in the United States and other
major industrial countries is earned by multinational companies that
have branches, subsidiaries, or joint ventures outside their
"home" country. This transformation was made possible in part
by developments in communication and transportation technology.
Satellites and telecommunication now make it possible, for example, for
Ford to design a part in Detroit and transmit it instantly to Italy or
South Africa, where it can be produced as easily as in Detroit. Jets
have made it nearly as easy to move an executive or a spare part from
one continent to another as from one region of the United States to
another. Technological changes have made it possible to perform
hightech work in the United States, while shipping labor-intensive
manual work on the same products to off-shore production units in
low-wage areas abroad. The result has been described as a "global
factory," in which workers in many different countries are involved
in the production of the same product. One company now offers new York
customers word processing and data entry services performed, via
satellite, by women working in Barbados for $1.50 an hour. The
internationalization of the economy is by no means only a result of
technological change, however. It was a central aspect of the economic
expansion of the 1960s and 1970s, which depended in large part on the
growth of trade, made possible by the various rounds of GATT tariff
reductions. It is also rooted in the massive development of
international finance in that period, which saw the growth of the
Eurodollar market, multinational banking investment in the third world,
and the consequent availability of capital from international markets
for economic investment in all parts of the world.

The effect of this internationalization is to put U.S. workers in
competition with workers all over the globe. If business can produce
electronic components more cheaply in Taiwan, or shoes more cheaply in
Poland, or enter data more cheaply in Barbados, it will do so. At
present, when management threatens to run away unless concessions are
given, the labor movement has no answer except protectionism, which can
save only a small proportion of jobs, and has negative effects for many
other workers.

Automation. New technology, based largely on robotics and
computers, has greatly undermined union power in production. While
technology has long been used to threaten specific grops of workers,
these new production techniques potentially can replace virtually any
kind of production worker, however skilled. Groups like first-class
machinists, who have been the backbone of union power in the electrical
and machinery industries, have been particularly hard hit by the current
round of automation. (Indeed, as David Noble and others have shown,
numerically controlled machine tools were developed in present form
specifically to weaken machinists' control of production.) The
"automation option," even if not exercised, is a gun ready to
give any group of workers the capital punishment of permanent layoff.

Studies by Barry Bluestone suggest that automation has had as much
or more effect on skill leves in non-union, white-collar occupations,
such as insurance and retail trade. Computers and computerized
check-out equipment have replaced skilled clerical and sales people with
de-skilled, lower paid, and increasingly female date entry and sales
clerks.

Deconcentration. Technology, transportation, and communication are
greatly accelerating the long-term trend away from concentration of
workers in the same industry in the same area. New factories are much
smaller than the great steel, auto, and other plants that once formed
the core of American production. They are likely to be far from the
other plants of the same company, or of the same industry. Production is
becoming decentralized. Workers in a community work in many unrelated
industries and occupations, without the tie of shared employment.
Community solidarity coincides less and less automatically with
workplace solidarity.

Conglomeratization. Many if not most large companies now operate
in a large number of unrelated industries. They are no longer dependent
for their profits on the performance of any particular industry. If one
branch or company does poorly, the parent company can simply sell it
off. Workers in any one plant or branch possess little economic
leverage against companies which operate in this way--as the Greyhound
strike recently demonstrated.

Shortened Time Horizons. Companies have become far less interested
in long-rang productive investments, far more interested in making a
quick buck. This is expressed in the "MBA syndrome," which
taught sophisticated managers to regard productive properties first of
all as assets to be bought and sold, and in the executive career ladders
which reward short-term profitability. But these in turn reflect deeper
structural changes in the economy. A long-term decline in the
profitability of production has meant that speculative uses of
money--from the Eurodollar market to land and stock speculation to the
purchase of rare pictures--become increasingly attractive. Milking
plant and equipment has in fact become more profitable than investing in
it.

Because of its short time horizons, management no longer has an
interest in long-term labor peace. Walter Chrysler lost no love on
unions, but he wanted to build cars in Detroit, and he would make an
accommodation with the United Auto Workers if necessary to do it. His
successors today would just as soon build cars in South Africa, buy
chemical companies, or speculate in Eurodollars. Labor peace in Detroit
means little to them.

Decline of Productive Investment. As profit rates on productive
investment have declined, economic resources have increasingly flowed
into nonproductive forms. This process has included purchase of some
companies by others, a la Marietta/Bendix; massive stock, money-market,
commodity, land, and other speculation; expanded investment in the
national debt of first-, second-, and third-world countries; and an
expanding share of world resources devoted to military and other
nonproductive purposes. This both results from and exacerbates the
stagnation of the world economy as a whole and the particular problems
of obsolescence and poor management of the U.S. economy.

In this context, large companies become less and less oriented
toward productiion--global traders and bankers rather than producers.
Production units are merely properties to be bought and sold. What they
produce can as easily be bought from smaller producers, if that should
prove advantageous. In such a situation, the companies lose thier stake
in good labor relations in any one area or industry.

Business management has aggravated these structural factors through
an extended campaign deliberately designed to undermine worker power.
One aspect has been direct union-busting, including lockouts, phony
bankruptcies, and many illegal tactics. Another has been the attack on
government programs and on government's power to enforce some
social responsibility on business. "Deregulation" has
enfranchised non-union employers in many industries. There has been a
massive propaganda campaign to blame economic problems on workers with
their supposedly excessive wages and unreasonable demands. And there
have been more subtle forms, such as the demand that workers "buy
out" failing company facilities and work in them for substandard
wages, or imitations of Japanese participation schemes, in which workers
are asked to give up all identification as workers and think of
themselves solely as "members of the firm."

These trends have been compounded by the effects of an economic
decline, which at its most severe saw a real unemployment rate higher
than in any of the depression years from 1936 to 1940. Unemployment was
worst precisely in those sectors where unions have been strong: in
September 1982, when overall unemployment stood at 10.2 percent, it was
18.2 percent in steel and other primary metals, 18.7 percent in auto,
and 22.6 percent in construction. Unemployment at this level can make
workers willing to accept almost any company demands to maintain their
jobs. Large cutbacks in the public sector created further unemployment
as well as undermining public sector unionism. Many of the layoffs in
both industrial and public sectors appear to be permanent. The
much-heralded "economic recovery" of 1983-84 resembles the
recovery of 1937, when national production rose above the 1929 level
while mass unemployment continued. Unemployment in the 7-12 percent
range now seems to be accepted as a permanent feature of the U.S.
economy.

Continuing mass unemployment is eroding wage levels even in the
period of "recovery." In the first half of 1983, one quarter
of new contracts contained pay cuts and one fifth had wage freezes.
Major concessions have recently been forced on workers at auto, steel,
trucking, airlines, and bus companies. Economic stagnation is reducing
U.S. wage levels relative to other countries (the United States has
moved from first to seventh since 1970) and creating a vast labor pool
that will work at or even below minimum wages. As a result low-wage,
labor-intensive, non-union industries are flooding back into
impoverished areas in the United States. There are now an estimated
3,000 sweatshops employing at least 50,000 workers in New York City
alone.

The labor surplus is also leading to the dismantling of the labor
market structures developed in both union and non-union spheres since
the 1930s, which created a degree of job security and employment
stability for most American workers. Temporary labor systems, with no
job security or benefits, are becoming increasingly prevalent,
especially for white-collar work. No longer the monopoly of such
agencies as Manpower and Kelly Girl, they are now more and more run by
manufacturers, hospitals, and other large employers for themselves.
They amount to a return to the shape-up. The number of part-time
workers in the workforce has increased rapidly. Many women hold two
part-time jobs. While statistics are impossible to come by, there can
be no question that there is a massive increase in homework
(overwhelmingly by women), involving both traditional garment and light
assembly work and all forms of work that can be performed on a computer
termineal in the home. And there is great growth of the underground
economy, work at or below the minimum wage done "off the
books."

Continued at their present rate for only a few year, these trends
will lead to a major shift in the work patterns and class atructure of
American working people. The majority of workers will work in
high-turnover occupations with no security, in which they are easily
replacable, frequently unemployed, or only employed part time.
Middle-income workers will become increasingly the exception, as more
and more workers come to receive a "common labor" wage rate at
or slightly above the minimum wage. (Just since 1978, the proportion of
Americans receiving what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as an
"intermediate" income fell from 55 percent to 42 percent, with
nearly 10 percent of the population falling from
"intermediate" to "low" income.) Despite mass
unemployment, the labor force will continue to grow due to continuing
population growth, immigration, and a rising rate of labor force
participation due to the poverty-induced need of women and children to
go to work. These results of mass unemployment should come as no
surprise; the "casualization of the labor market" was a
principal effect of mass unemployment in previous depressions, too.

Impact on the Labor Movement

The wage concessions forced on American workers have been the most
highly publicized manifestation of the the impact of these developments
on the unions. Wage concessions to faltering companies in hard times
are nothing new, and do not necessarily indicate any long-term changes
in the labor movement. But in present circumstances, unions are losing
their ability to perform their most basic functions.

Whatever their limits, unions have performed three key functions
within the U.S. capitalist system. First, they took wages out of the
realm of unfettered competition and created structured wage rates within
companies, patterned bargaining within industries, and general wage
standards for the economy as a whole. As many labor economists have
noted, a primary union function has been to eliminate wages as a factor
of competition. But this is precisely what has been lost in the past
three years of collective bargaining. The patterns are fading, and it
has become the workers of every industry, every company--even every
plant--for themselves.

Second, unions have enforced rigid rules that were designed to
provide a degree of security for those holding jobs. It is perhaps in
this area that concessions to companies have been greatest. Unions have
given up rules preventing the "contracting out" of jobs to
people outside the bargaining unit, limiting part-time work, defining
job categories, determining job assignment by seniority, preventing the
assignment of workers to more than one job, and restricting speed-up.
The "flexibility" provided management by these changes is just
the other side of workers' loss of job security.

Third, unions have provided a form of "industrial
legality" in which employers were forced to follow
non-discriminatory procedures laid out in negotiated contracts in
dealing with their workers, with grievance procedures through which
workers could appeal company decisions that were unfair or that violated
the contract. This function is being undermined by a destruction of
union power on the shop floor which is hardly reported in the newspapers
and almost impossible to measure, but which is profoundly important.

Many companies are now engaged in pervasive violations of union
contracts. These involve firings, disciplinary actions, violations of
seniority in job assignments and layoffs, and other nuts-and-bolts
aspects of unionism as a system of "industrial legality."
Contract violations are nothing new, but unions now find themselves
increasingly powerless to respond. Companies have provoked so many
grievances that many grievance procedures have bogged down if not
collapsed. Union officials are tied up defending people for absenteeism
and similar minor charges, while massive contract violations go
unchallenged. Workers who might normally use direct action on the job
to protest blatant contract violations are too afraid of being
victimized by arbitrary firing themselves. The companies are left free
to violate the contracts.

Unions are losing members directly through unemployment. 120,000
of the 300,000 teamsters covered by the national freight agreement are
reported out of work. Some 42,000 out of 160,000 United Mine Workers
members are unemployed. Unions are also losing members through direct
union-busting, or through the subcontracting of work from union to
non-union firms. Even in the coal industry there are now "runaway
coal mines" (made possible by a recent UMW contract), where
companies that formerly ran their own mines now buy coal from non-union
producers. Over 50 percent of rubber production and 60 percent of coal
mining is now non-union; altogether a lower proportion of construction
workers are unionized now than in the 1930s. The unions are unable to
organize new workers for many reasons, not least of which is that they
are increasingly powerless against employers, unable to help or even
protect those who might otherwise desire to organize. As a result,
membership is decreasing sharply. According to The Economist,
"between 1950 and 1980, union membership dropped from about
one-third of the labor force to 18 percent. Since then it has tumbled
to about 15 percent."

The impact on the union apparatus is serious, although also
difficult to measure. The decreasing dues base is leading to staff
cutbacks--the UAW laid off 100 and the machinists 200. Mergers and
raiding appear to many unions as possible ways to escape the
consequences of shrinking memberships. There appears to be a tendency
toward contracting out of service departments. There is less interest
in challenging concessions, firings, and grievances. The quality of
servicing provided by the national unions is widely reported to be
deteriorating sharply.

Union officials are also less and less able to use the apparatus of
government to win gains for their members. The number of complaints to
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) are sharply
down, both because it is regarded as even less effective under Reaganite
leadership than it was in the past, and because workers are afraid to
raise issues that may cost them their jobs. Federal and state agencies
charged with dfending health and safety are currently flooded with
company petitions for waivers of health and safety standards.
Government agencies charged with protecting the rights of minorities,
the handicapped, and other groups of workers have in many cases become
simply non-functional. The backlog of cases at the National Labor
Relation Board (NLRB) has quadrupled since 1978.

A Born-Again Labor Movement?

The labor movement is something older and bigger than the
institutions of trade unionism or collective bargaining. The labor
movement has been through many times of collapse and reorganization
since it arose along with the rise of capitalism. Its times of
collapse have also made possible its times of regroupment, when it
developed new forms corresponding to the changed needs of working people
in a changed economy and society. To understand what forms mights make
possible a rebirth of the movement, we need to acknowledge problems that
have so weakened the labor movement in its present form.

The fact that new forms are necessary doesn't mean that
struggles to preserve what workers already have in the way of
organizations and rights should be abandoned. On the contrary,
management attacks on workers' rights should be fought at every
point. But unionists within those struggles need to recognize the need
for new forms, just as the best of those within the American Federation
of Labor in the 1920s and 1930s recognized the necessity for industrial
unionism and provided part of the impetus for organizing the CIO.

As their situations become more precarious, workers'
discontent with the status quo is likely to rise. Millions of people
are going to want to do something to change things. But the existing
forms of industrial unionism are unlikely to be a suitable vehicle. The
challenge will be to develop appropriate new forms of organization and
action. These will not spring from the brain of any one individual;
they will have to be the product of the thought, discussion, and
experimentation of millions of people. In the remainder of this article
I would like to examine certain experiences from the labor
movement's history which might contribute to the process.

It is unlikely that the growing number of workers who are becoming
part of a low-paid, semi-casualized workforce can be organized into
existing unions and achieve recognition and legal collective bargaining
under current conditions. But that is not the only alternative. There
is considerabl experience to draw on, both recent and older, for how
labor organizations can operate in casualized, high-turnover labor
markets. One form has been pioneered by working women's groups,
such as Nine-To-Five in Boston. Employer abuses are attacked through
publicity, picketing, and other forms of direct action that are not
dependent on union bargaining rights in a workplace. (Similar tactics
have long been used by the civil rights movement to attack racist
employment policies.) Campaigns can start by attacking the worst
abuses, while proposing standards with which all employers will
ultimately be expected to comply. By such means, workers can establish
minimum wages and working conditions in an industry or community without
legally recognized collective bargaining rights.

Control of the hiring process has often proven crucial in highly
casualized labor markets. West Coast longshoremen in the early 1930s,
for example, focused their organizing efforts on controlling the
casualized labor market based on the shape-up. By establishing worker
control of the hiring process through union-run hiring halls, the
longshoremen were able to eliminate the intense competition that had
prevailed among workers under the shape-up. Attempts to gain control
over hiring might prove to be of renewed importance in today's
labor markets dominated by temporary employment agencies.

Another approach was that of the Wobblies, perhaps the greatest
experts ever known in utilizing worker power in highly casualized labor
markets. Despite shape-ups and high turnover, they were able in many
situations to use group norms, conscious withdrawal of efficiency,
surprise work stoppages, and similar techniques to win concrete gains
for workers who on the face of things appeared powerless. Wobblies
retained their membership rights and their identification with the union
as they moved from job to unemployment to next job in highly casualized
labor markets.

Of course activities of this kind depend on the commitment and
initiative of rank-and-file participants. And in the absence of dues
check-off and union security clauses, a labor movement can hardly depend
primarily on paid, professional organizers and staff. It is hard to see
how a labor movement could be effective under the conditions developing
today without a major shift in initiative and power toward rank-and-file
activists.

As industrial deconcentration makes it necessary to look for
organizational forms that might supersede industrial unionism, we may
have something to learn from the historical experience of the Knights of
Labor. American industry in the late nineteenth century resembled in
certain ways the pattern toward which the U.S. economy seems headed
today. Large numbers of shops of varying sizes spread through both
rural and urban areas. The Knights created an organization which
embraced "all workers of hand or brain.c All members in a
region--whatever their industry, employer, or craft--were organized into
the same district. Each district was comprosed of local assemblies
which might represent those from one workplace, one craft, or mixed
locals, including workers from many workplaces and even housewives. In
recent times, a rather similar structure was created by the workers of
Polish Solidarity.

A related alternative is the kind of movement in which each
community's central labor council is th emost important labor
institution, with many labor organizations of various kinds represented
within it. In the First World War era, central labor councils were far
more important in many cities than any particular union. In Seattle,
for example, the important role of the Central Labor Council made
possible the general strike in 1919. Similar patterns have been
important historically in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. Currently,
central labor councils in a number of cities, for example Martinsburg
(W. Va.), have begun to play somewhat this kind of role. Elsewhere, as
in Daville (Ill.), shadow labor councils have been established by
insurgent union activists to perform similar functions. The
occupational safety and health groups that have formed in many areas
also provide possible growing points for this sort of development: they
create networks among rank-and-file workers in many different
workplaces, mobilize attacks on particular abuses, and combine workplace
organizing and political pressure tactics to impose health and safety
standards on employers.

These exmaples suggest the possibility of making a community rather
than an industry the basic unit of the labor movement. This could lead
to the development of a direct sense of solidarity and mutual support
among all workers in a given area--crucial if workers are to develop
mass power. Of course such an approach will hardly fit into the
carefully worked out boundaries among different groups of workers
established by NLRB bargaining-unit rules and union jurisdictional
policies. But is is essential if we are to recover some of the weapons
that have led to labor victories in the past, such as sympathetics
strikes and boycotts and other forms of mutual support. Such an
approach to organization can also make it possible to overcome some of
the obsolete divisions between white- and blue-collar workers.

With organization on community rather than industrial lines, the
labor movement would be more able to regard the relation between workers
and their immediate employer as only one focus among several, and not
necessarily the most important. It could represent the interests of
workers in their communities, perhaps via some kind of integration with
the kinds of community action represented by the neighborhood groups,
citizens action groups, ACORN-type organizations, and the like that have
developed to represent the interests of low- and middle-income
communities in recent years.

Such a labor movement could increse its effectiveness by leveraging
power among workplace, political, and community arenas. We are already
seeing the development of various alliances between community
organizations and local labor movements in the form of citywide
community-labor alliances and similar organizations.

Moving from a national to an international labor movement will be
one of the most difficult challenges, but also one of the most
important. The working class has a long history of internationalism.
The First International was formed largely out of a recognition by trade
unions of the necessity for mutual support among workers of the various
capitalist countries. Subsequent Internationals attempted to intergrate
the working class politically on an international basis. On the whole,
however, nationalism has proved a more powerful force than labor
internationalism throughout the twentieth century.

The internationalization of the economy has made an important
change in the immediate economic interests of U.S. workers. A large
part of the American workforce experienced considerable prosperity
through its partnership in America's global economic dominance. As
that dominance declined, these groups were hurt, and their first
response was to turn to protectionism to "save American jobs."
But neither an expanded drive for exports nor protectionism will help
any but a tiny proportion of U.S. workers in the future. Increasingly,
American wages will be driven toward the lowest rates than can be found
abroad. This creates the basis for an alternative attitude and
strategy, based on the interest of American workers in supporting the
right of working people throughout the world to organize politically and
economically to raise their wages and conditions of life. This implies
direct antagonism to American corporate interests and U.S. foreign
policy. But the interests of American workers now lie in opposing U.S.
support for repressive regimes, since it is their suppression of workers
that makes possible the low wages and "stability" that lure
American jobs abroad. Economic conditions are creating teh basis for
labor internationalism, and for a far more progressive attitude on the
part of the American labor movement.

Experiments with international rank-and-file links are under way.
For example, representatives of longshoremen in many countries--some
rank-and-file committees, some union locals, and some national
unions--meet regularly to ensure that longshoremen in different
countries don't scab on each other. The attempt to establish
direct links at a rank-and-file level among workers throughout the world
will be difficult, but it is essential to counter corporate efforts to
play workers off against each other.

Capital mobility has been made possible by modern unionism's
acceptance of "management's right to manage." Virtually
every labor contract recognizes the employer's exclusive right to
make all basic decisions concerning capital allocation and the direction
of production. This removes workers from any voice in the most basic
decisions concerning technology, investment, plant closing, or the other
factors that are currently transforming workers' lives.

Such acceptance of "management prerogatives" has not
always been the practice in the labor movement, however. Indeed, one of
the strengths of traditional craft unionism was its exercise of controls
over the production process itself. The power of the Amalgamated
Association of Iron and Steel Workers at Carnegic Steel's Homestead
Works 1892 was described in a famous comment by a hostile contemporary:
"The method of apportioning the work, of regulating the turns, of
altering the machinery, in short, every detail of working the great
plant, was subject to the interference of some busybody representing the
Amalgamated Association." Some unions, notably the glassmakers,
actually regulated the quantity of production for entire industries.

A renewed challenge to "management rights" can be seen
arising from several directions today. One is the push by many unions,
notably the UAW and the Machinists, to fight for union controls over the
introduction of new technology. This drive has been codified in the
"Technology Bill of Rights" developed by the Machinists.
Another is the movement for plant closing legislation, which challenges
management's right to unlimited mobility. The latter reflects the
common interest of workers and communities in asserting social control
over capital.

In times when gains from employers are hard to come by, people have
to survive nonetheless. For that reason, various forms of self-help and
mutual aid have often been important parts of the labor movement during
hard times.

They not only aid material survival, but also help people resist
the atomization and demoralization that can be such devastating results
of unemployment and economic insecurity. Mutual-aid organizations exist
today in the form of cooperative day-care programs, food banks, and
employment services, through which working people can provided for their
own survival and prevent total atomization. The unemployed leagues of
the Great Depression seem to be developing a contemporary counterpart in
the form of organizations like the Mon Valley Unemployed Committees,
which have organized food banks, demanded expanded unemployment relief,
and even used political pressure to stop foreclosures of property of
unemployed workers. The expansion of such self-help activities may well
be a necessary part of the labor movement of the future.

There is also something to be learned from the direction in which
the civil-rights movement was evolving at the time of Martin Luther
King's assassination. This involved a shift toward economic issues
and the organization of workers, especially the working poor.
King's approach was to combine organization of poorer working-class
groups in community-based unions (Memphis garbage strike) and
neighborhoods (Chicago community unions) with a national direct action
mobilization around the rights of the poor. Local actions would have
interacted with the national movement in somewhat the same way that the
great civil-rights struggles in Montgomery and Birmingham did with the
national movement and the pressures it brought on the government.

The Poor People's Campaign, with its economic demands and
Washington encampment, was intended to trigger a lower class political
mobilization for which the time was not ripe. With today's mass
unemployment and destruction of economic security for a growing
proportion of the population, the conditions for such an approach may be
more favorable. The number who feel economically deprived appears far
greater. And much of the better off part of the working class, which
felt rather threatened by the movements of poor and minorities in the
1960s, faces a common threat with them today.

There are different ways a born-again labor movement could arise.
It could be the product of a split in the old labor movement, as
occurred with the CIO. It could be the product of independent radicals
(as was the IWW), particularly feminists. It could grow out of a
period of popular struggles which suddenly crystallized in a new
organization, as Solidarity did in Poland. What will contribute most to
such a development is ongoing experimentation to discover forms that can
actually work.

COPYRIGHT 1984 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.
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